Eugene Chernett

I am in awe at how much a skilled filmmaker armed with a great cast can do with such a thin, almost nonexistent, plot and barely any dialogue. I did not find myself bored at any point throughout this film, despite suffering—like most of us do—from a short attention span (thanks, TikTok). What follows is a bit of a spoiler: the film does have an actual point, even though it superficially appears to be lacking one. It plays on our tendency to place the blame for something terrible at the feet of a conscious agent. We don’t want to treat anything as a mishap or an unfortunate event that has no explanation. We are very quick to blame, despite generally seeing ourselves as fair and forgiving. When it seems to us like the main character is hell bent on abandoning his family, we see him as a deadbeat father and a terrible husband. After we learn that he’s not really abandoning his family, at least not in a sense we imagined, we still blame him for what happens to his sister. And his sister’s kids certainly do the same. Ultimately, there is no one left to blame. And we just have to live with that, as we often do in real life. Indeed, most of life’s predicaments are not anyone’s fault, despite our best efforts to convince ourselves otherwise. The answer to most of the big “why” questions in life tends to be “it just is.”